Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  "Nothing," I said, "can go wrong now."

  DOCUMENT HELL

  October 9-12, 1987

  I

  cannot produce a list, an orderly list, of the things one must do to load a one-ton four-wheel-drive pickup truck onto a containerized cargo ship out of Cartagena. The suffocating blizzard of paper generated in the process, when finally assembled, stacks up like the manuscript pages of War and Peace. It takes two or more people to cart the paper around, and all the documents must be allowed to visit many different buildings in all areas of the city.

  The boat was leaving sometime in the evening or early morning hours. It was Friday, October 9, and we had one business day—until five o'clock—to write War and Peace. If we failed, it would be a week or more before we could book passage on an appropriate ship. It was a make-or-break day.

  Luis and Santiago met us at the hotel in the battered Chevy. They introduced us to a tall clever-looking man, Jaime Lopez, who had some experience in expediting these matters. Jaime, I saw with dismay, was not at all sure we could complete the work in one day, and especially not on this day. The coming Monday, October 12, was a national holiday, Discovery of America Day, and Colombians were looking forward to a three-day weekend. Latin Americans are little different from North Americans in such a situation. Not a lot of work gets done on Friday afternoon. People were looking forward to family outings, parties, binges at the disco.

  My stomach felt fluttery, a sensation symptomatic of incipient Zippy's.

  The shipping agent took our money and told us that our ship was called the Stella Lykes. He said they did not have twenty-four-foot

  containers: if our truck was twenty-one feet long, we'd have to shell out for a forty-footer. We paid cash, and got a few hundred receipts for our money. The shipping agent said we'd have to come back to this downtown office later with certain official forms obtainable only at the port.

  There was a parking lot at the port where a crowd of people saw fit to surround the Sierra and the Chevy. Luis looked at them and they went away. A black man with a crutch and a withered left leg wandered into the sudden void and said he'd watch the car for us. His upper arms were huge. He said his name was Danny and that he had been in twenty-seven countries and he was wondering whether we'd like to buy any cocaine.

  A few of us stayed by the truck until we were cleared to drive it into the port area. We gave Danny $5 to watch the Chevy. In point of fact, we had all noticed that Danny's crutch would be useful for wreaking havoc upon automobiles owned by penny-pinchers. It was the president's Chevy and, for that reason, we wanted Danny to like us. The car had suffered enough.

  After an interminable conversation with a number of friendly but uninformed officials, it became clear that we couldn't put the truck in the cargo container and obtain the documents we needed to give to the shipping agent until we secured yet another set of documents at the customs office, which was not at the port but conveniently located a mile away.

  The customs office looked like a junior college in Bakersfield and a man wearing muted-green slacks and a bright-green shirt came out to examine the truck. He looked like the late comedian Andy Kaufman: he had that same expression of eager bewilderment. It was, he said, impossible to examine the truck because it was raining. Did we have an umbrella? No? This is true? He seemed to be staggered by the information. He appealed to Jaime Lopez: these men had driven the length of South America without an umbrella? Yes. But it was unthinkable!

  A compromise was reached. Kaufman would ride down to the port, where a soldier could examine the truck in the rain and report to him, and then we could all ride back to the customs building and sign the proper documents.

  Back at the port a tall soldier in a crisply pressed uniform opened the camper shell and reeled back, assaulted by the putrescent odor of rotting organic substances and the reek of diesel. This was, by far, the worst the truck had ever smelled. Everything had been baking in the tropical sun. Garry and I were very proud.

  The fastidious soldier fingered an extra pair of shoes I had—they were covered over in what must have seemed a strange, vaguely strawberry-colored crust—then took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands.

  He could, it seemed, sign one of the necessary documents himself if Andy Kaufman cosigned.

  Luis stayed with the truck. Santiago, Jaime Lopez, Garry, and I piled into the Chevy and drove back to the customs office. Kaufman noticed that Santiago was drifting into intersections at stoplights because he was using the hand brake to stop.

  "Don't you have any brakes?" he asked.

  "No," Santiago said, "I don't."

  Once inside the customs building, we were subjected to a cruel psychology experiment involving a maze of offices. A man sitting behind a desk and wearing a big gold chain around his neck looked at the carnet, stamped it, and gave it back. In an office fifty feet down the hall, a large lady in a red skirt with tightly curled black hair put another stamp on top of the stamp the man with the gold chain awarded us. We visited five more offices where we secured various stamps or where previous stamps were initialed. After an official initialed a preexisting stamp, he usually stamped it himself, bam, for good measure.

  The group of us had scattered throughout the maze, working independently but for the same goal. Jaime Lopez appeared in the lobby, looking disproportionately forlorn. He motioned us back through a maze of corridors into a corner office where Andy Kaufman sat behind a large empty desk, looking morose in his eagerly bewildered way.

  The carnet was written in French and though he didn't speak the language himself, he knew what information went where. All except for item number twelve. He didn't know what it said and couldn't sign the document.

  The desk was covered with a glass plate, and under the glass was a large picture of Jesus, His Sacred Heart glowing in His chest. Garry looked at the picture. It was huge, about twice the size of a record album.

  Garry explained, through Jaime Lopez, that he was from Canada and that French was a national language there, taught in all the schools.

  "Ahh, well then you could . . ."

  "Of course."

  Garry can't read a lick of French. He stared down at the picture of

  Jesus, took a deep breath, and lied. "Item twelve is the number of your badge."

  And so, with another flourish of the pen, we had cleared customs. Back at the port Danny offered us the services of attractive women who might help us enjoy the use of illegal drugs, and we gave him $5 to watch the car. There was, it seemed, the need for another search by another soldier. Buffeted by an unspeakable stench, he motioned for me to close the camper shell, hurry up, right now. Another document was signed.

  Garry could now drive the truck into the container, which was a large rust-colored metal box with iron hooks protruding out of the floor to secure the load. We had to fold back the wire side mirrors to fit the truck into the container, and it was necessary to position the vehicle in the middle of the box, for balance. We couldn't however, lock the container until we had certain other necessary documents. Santiago smiled at the soldier, put an arm around his shoulders, and walked him a little way down one of the piers. There seemed to be an exchange made, hands touching hands. They came back laughing together and the soldier said that, for us, he would lock the container. Not only that, he'd personally stand guard over it until we came back.

  Then we were speeding through the crowded streets of Cartagena, on our way to collect documents from the immigration service, when Santiago had to pull up hard on the emergency brake. We slid halfway out into a street where a parade was in progress. Attractive young women in abbreviated black dresses were doing hoochi-coo dances in the back seats of old Chevy convertibles. We backed out of the festivities and waited. It was maddening: how many 1966 Chevys could there be in Cartagena?

  "What did you say to that soldier back at the port?" I asked Santiago. "How did you get him to do that?"

  "Do what?"

  "Get him to watch the
truck?"

  "He's my cousin," Santiago said.

  We were parked next to the Fortress of San Felipe. It had thick brick walls that sloped inward as they got higher. There were gun ports scattered over the great expanse of leaning brick that rose perhaps forty feet above us. It was a historic old fort, built around 1600, and, from my position at the bottom, it seemed impossible that any number of men, armed only with muskets, could overrun these massive and intimidating fortifications.

  The central part of Cartagena itself, the old city, was surrounded by walls about ten feet high and fifteen feet thick. The walls were built by the Spanish between the years 1634 and 1735. There were two more forts defending the city and one that guarded the sea approach.

  Cartagena was in need of walls because it was a collection point for all of the gold and silver the Spanish conquistadores collected from the conquered Aztecs, the Incas, the remnant Maya. Gold was shipped out of Peru and taken north up the Pacific coast to Panama, where it was ferried across the narrowest part of the isthmus by man and mule. It was then collected at a port on the eastern coast of Panama, Portobelo, and shipped down to Cartagena, where it was stored, sometimes for as long as a year, until a flotilla of cargo-carrying galleons and warships could be assembled to take the treasures back to Spain.

  The amount of gold that the Spaniards took out of Peru alone is staggering: billions of dollars worth of it. The Incas used gold ornamentally. There were hammered golden plates representing the sun, which was sacred to the Incas. There were whole temples containing ornamental gardens made of gold: golden stalks of corn, for instance. Piles of golden potatoes.

  All these riches poured into Cartagena, and the city was a tempting target for privateers, as the English pirates preferred to call themselves. They were only doing their patriotic duty, harassing Spain in the interest of England. Sir Francis Drake and 1,300 men sacked the city in 1586. A Frenchman, Baron de Pointis, took Cartagena with 10,000 men in 1697. In 1741, the great walls were in place, the fortifications strengthened and improved. An English force of 27,000 men laid seige to the city for fifty-six days but were finally turned back.

  The walls of Cartagena are monuments to an officially sanctioned thievery that the culprits called glory. The English could steal from the Spanish for the glory of England. The Spanish could steal from the indigenous peoples of the Americas for the glory of Spain.

  As in any large and successful criminal enterprise, greed expands and infects the entire chain of command. It is thought that many of the Spanish treasure ships that sunk on the way back to the Old World did so because they were dangerously overweighted with undeclared treasure that returning conquistadores had hoarded for themselves.

  And, in Spain, there was a growing sense that not all of the gold and silver stolen in the New World was reaching its "proper owners." Officials wanted records to trace the path of the treasure. Intense documentation of every phase of the plunder business was implemented. How much gold from the Inca mine? Fill out some documents and make

  copies for the viceroy, for the accountants in Seville. The captains of the ships that ferried the treasure up the west coast of the Americas filled out documents. Wherever gold and silver changed hands, there were documents to be filled out and signed and stamped and initialed and signed and stamped again.

  Men whose duty it was to process these documents felt left out of the process. They had to stamp this or that piece of paper and watch an unimaginable fortune pass by under their noses, untouched.

  Officials found that they could delay work on the newly required documents, they could "misplace" essential papers, they could cause no end of trouble. It became easier for those moving the treasure to simply pay for the documents. Everyone, all down the line, got a little bit of the take. Things went smoother that way. It was only fair.

  And that, I thought, sitting under the walls of the fort as an interminable line of 1966 Chevys and hoochi-coo dancers passed by, is the reason that the simplest business procedures in Latin America must be built upon a mountain of paperwork. It's a time-honored tradition.

  Even today, public officials, customs officers for instance, are very poorly paid. On the other hand, everyone knows that they are entitled to a little bite of all business that passes their way: a kind of informal tax.

  Whole villages can still be fed on the proceeds derived from one official document. In Latin America, every time a new official document is created, more families eat. No other area on the face of the earth is so dazed by documentation.

  The parade killed us. It was noon, and every official office would be closed until two. Jaime Lopez groaned in despair: it had now become impossible.

  Santiago dropped Garry and I at the hotel, where we said good-bye to Joe Skorupa who was flying back to New York. He said he'd check with Jane to see where we were and promised to meet us in Prudhoe Bay with a bottle of champagne. I said I didn't know if we would make it to Alaska. Maybe I'd just stay in Cartagena and sign documents for the rest of my life. I could die happy then; hell would hold no terrors for me.

  Santiago went off to get the brakes fixed. He figured the last three hours of the impossible paper chase would be frantic and thought he'd be able to drive faster through the growing tangle of traffic if he felt himself able to stop.

  The brake job took until two-fifteen and Santiago was afflicted with

  a severe and perhaps irremediable case of Zippy's when he picked us up. He tore through traffic, violated stop signs, and parked in the only available spaces, all of which were under clearly visible signs that read, no parking. If there was a police officer present, all the better. Santiago would leap out of the car, throw his arms around the officer, hands would touch hands, they would laugh together for a moment, and then the officer would stand and watch our car until we had completed our business. Once, when the five of us came running out of a building, we saw one of these policemen waving away a tow truck.

  Santiago, it seemed, had a lot of cousins in Cartagena.

  We got the very last document we needed, the bill of lading from the shipping agency, at exactly 4:59. Jaime Lopez didn't care about the Pan-American Highway: he thought we had set an unbreakable record on this very day.

  The Stella Lykes was a Constellation Class cargo carrier, 665 feet long with a 75-foot beam. A steam turbine engine generated fifteen thousand horsepower from a single four-bladed screw. Registered in the United States, the ship has a normal cruising range of twenty thousand nautical miles and is manned by a crew of thirty-six. She cruises at a maximum of twenty-eight miles an hour and uses $200 worth of fuel per mile.

  There were accommodations for eight passengers in four double cabins. Passengers on board for the duration pay $3,000 per person for a voyage of approximately thirty-five days with stops at Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura: working ports. There are two Panama Canal transits.

  Garry and I shared a stateroom which was set amidships and might have been a room in a motel called the Economy Eight Travel Rhode Inn. There were four such staterooms, but we were the only passengers. Across the hall was a huge lounge with three couches, two card tables, a coffee table, a TV, a VCR, and a small galley.

  We had said good-bye to Santiago and Luis only a few minutes before, and it had been a surprisingly emotional scene. They had come up to the stateroom, and when we were safely ensconced in the lap of economy, there was nothing left to do but say good-bye. Garry took Santiago's hand: the two of them looked each other in the eye, and then it was time for the big Latin embrace. Everybody hugged everybody, and we all did it again, on the deck, as Luis and Santiago were leaving.

  "Those guys," Garry said, "were pros."

  When had we ever even talked to them? Once, over coffee, on the

  road. A little bit in the Chevy as we were assembling War and Peace. I suppose Garry and I were impressed with the way Santiago and Luis carried themselves, their confidence and skill.

  "We put our lives in their hands," I said.

  "Sometimes
, on those blind curves, all I could see was Santiago's hand, circling or patting the dog," Garry said. "I put our lives in Santiago's hand. His left hand."

  "And they were beat. Did you notice that? Big circles under their eyes, running around half roto."

  "I think they figured we'd been driving like that from Tierra del Fuego and would keep doing it on to Alaska. There was some mutual respect going on."

  "And then Luis grabs your arm," Garry said. He imitated Luis's voice: " Teem, don't get off the boat.' "

  These two pros had gotten us on the Stella Lykes after three days of hectic mayhem and didn't think it would be a good idea for us to go into town for any reason whatsoever. Something could happen: a fight, an arrest, a misunderstanding. No, it was safer to stay on the Stella Lykes.

  "I think." Garry said, "I was sadder saying good-bye to those two guys than I was when I said good-bye to Jane and the girls. Because I knew I was going to see my family at the end of the trip. I don't know when or if I'll ever see Santiago and Luis again."

  We sat for a while on our respective beds.

  "Good guys," Garry said.

  Time went by.

  "This is strange," I said.

  "The boat is supposed to set sail early this morning."

  The whole day had been a hundred-yard dash, a frustrating, exhilarating race. Now we had nothing to do. Nothing at all. Run as fast as you can for a hundred yards but don't cross the finish line. That's what it felt like.

  "Teem," Garry said, "don't get off the boat."

  We went down four flights of stairs to the officers' mess in the Stella Lykes. Stacked near the door were compressed air tanks, very tightly secured, and above them was a big sign informing passersby that such tanks can fall over and that compressed air can escape through a hole the size of a pencil, which would cause the heavy tanks to rocket around and ricochet off the walls and kill people.